What Are The Gobshites Saying These Days?

Welcome back to our weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue which, as you know, is what Haydn would have come up with, had he written the Duck Call Concerto N. 3 In A Flat, or, for that matter, in a small semi-detached outside Wensleydale.

We proceed.

Before moving on to the doings on The Sunday Shows, we must congratulate two New York Times stalwarts for using The Most Valuable Real Estate In Journalism as a walking-park for their own peculiar neuroses. First, there is the inimitable Ms. Dowd who, in the course of praising Joe Biden for being a hale-fellow-well-met just like her beloved departed Irish cop daddy — The memories ring in her mind like spittoons — manages to remind us (again) that the president thinks he's soooooooooo smarrrrrrrrrt. (She'll get him during independent study. You just wait.)

From the beginning of their alliance in 2008, Biden felt passionately that he needed to interpret the dispassionate Obama for regular folk. It was an attitude that probably annoyed Obama, who does not like to feel dependent or beholden, having fought his way up in the world mostly under his own steam. But when Obama let Biden take over the cliff talks, and when he noted with asperity that he would not debate Congress again over paying its bills, he dug into his revulsion at playing the game, his reluctance to even fake the flattering, schmoozing and ring-kissing needed to coax Congress into doing what he wants. Even members of his own party have lost faith in his ability to use the White House as a social lubricant to get his agenda passed, or to use that big brain of his to become a more clever negotiator, rather than a scolding lecturer...The vice president was in the Senate for 36 years while the president merely breezed through. Obama radiates contempt at Congress for not being a bunch of high-minded, effective people, and for expecting him to clean up its mess. He thinks reasonable people should see things his way in a reasonable amount of time, and gets impatient when ideology, ego, identity politics and pork-project whining hold up progress.

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Just call him "uppity" and get it over with, will you? Then you can get back to your real work of feminizing "Obambi" again.

And then there Ross Cardinal Douthat, auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese Of Shambala, who assesses the recent fiscal unpleasantness in the Congress, and thanks God, with Whom he shares a Twitter account, for the strong and steady leadership of...John Boehner.

That service hasn't been the achievement of a grand bargain with the White House, which he has at times assiduously sought. Nor has it been the sweeping triumph over liberalism that certain right-wing activists expect him to somehow gain. Rather, it's been a kind of disaster management - a sequence of bomb-defusal operations that have prevented our dysfunctional government from tipping into outright crisis.

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"Assiduously" is a very elastic word when applied to Boehner's dealings with the White House. But, ultimately, His Eminence gets around to giving credit to Boehner for being good at his job as the concierge in Bedlam, while trying to pretend that it's everyone's fault but the congressional Republicans that the congressional Republicans are an exaltation of loons.

The Republicans' current position makes things harder still, because Boehner's party has much more power in Washington than it has support in the nation as a whole. Republicans are a minority party nationally, but thanks to redistricting they control the House despite Democrats' 2012 successes. This mismatch leaves the base spoiling for fights that can't actually be won: House Republicans have just enough real power to raise conservative expectations but not nearly enough to bend a liberal president and a Democratic Senate to their will. Boehner's job, then, requires constantly pushing hard enough to persuade his caucus that he's maximizing Republican leverage, while simultaneously looking for ways to make small, can-kicking deals at the last possible moment. Which he's always found, by hook or by crook: there was no government shutdown in the spring of 2011, no debt default that summer, and the fiscal cliff was averted (at least temporarily) last week.

Note how "The Base" gets blamed in there without acknowledgement that The Base is the entire party now, and that it was the creation of The Base — helped along by the rise of movement conservatism that produced, among other people, His Eminence — that demented the Republican party in the first place. Sincerely well-played, the both of you.

Moving along, we begin our survey at the studios of This Week With The Clinton Guy Shocked By Blowjobs, and we begin with a caution to Democrats. Watch out for this Heidi Heitkamp person from North Dakota. She'd only been in the Senate for four days and, already, she was sounding like a permafrosted Joe Lieberman. To wit:

We all need to stop talking in ultimatums and say only these — you know, narrowing the debate, put everything on the table, start working together, that's what you do in America in every small town and every business in America. You don't rule out anything until you've actually had a dialogue.

Also, too — ponies! Actually, I do rule some things out. I rule out, for example, voucherizing Medicare, or privatizing Social Security, or declaring war on Iran, or making firearms mandatory for public schoolteachers, to name just three ideas that have no little popularity in the small town that is America. Ever been to a town meeting in a small town? There are always three nuts who believe the government is controlling their minds through fluoridated water. There is no point in having "a dialogue" with those people. Please proceed, senator:

I think what we need to do is stop talking in ultimatums and start talking about how we resolve the issue, with — with a sense of urgency. And so that's what the American people sent us here to do, and that's why I think I got elected, because I talked about results. You know, there's people who've run for these jobs who want the job and then there's people who want to do the job. And we just need to get to work.

And aren't you special, as opposed to that lazy, showboating slob Bernie Sanders, who's out there trying to keep the tattered safety net together with his teeth while you're planning ice-cream socials with the crazy people. Asked about the possibility of Chuck Hagel's being confirmed as Secretary Of Defense, Heitkamp again retreated to the Grange Hall of her mind.

I mean, to me, in America, you give everybody a chance to speak for themselves and then we'll decide. And so it just, again, is this — this kind of fight is the fight that the people of this country get so frustrated about and with. Let Chuck Hagel get nominated, if he's going to be nominated, and let's hear what the senator has to say.

When I listen for the voice of the people of America, my first choice generally is not the junior senator from North Dakota. But things got really good when it came to guns, because Heitkamp is a lifetime member of the NRA with a 100 percent rating from those folks. She's one of those millions of "responsible" gun owners who nonetheless cannot seem to keep the national governing board of their organization free from sociopaths.

You know, it's unclear. I mean, you read Washington Post stories and you listen to what the administration says, and so I think what we need to do is we need to take a look at what happened at Sandy Hook. When I was attorney general, I was tasked with a national task force on school violence. We made a number of recommendations which, in fact, were adopted at Sandy Hook to help keep schools safer. They weren't adequate. Let's start addressing the problem. And to me, one of the issues that I think comes — screams out of this is the issue of mental health and the care for the mentally ill in our country, especially the dangerously mentally ill. And so we need to have a broad discussion before we start talking about gun control...Well, I think you need to put everything on the table, but what I hear from the administration — and if the Washington Post is to be believed — that's way — way in extreme of what I think is necessary or even should be talked about. And it's not going to pass.

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Wait. I thought the whole point of what "the people of this country" wanted from national leaders like Heidi Heitkamp was that "you don't rule anything out." Now, when it comes to firearms, the proposals floated this week by the administration are so extreme that they should not even "be talked about." Oh, I think this one's going to be a prize, she is.

Moving along to CBS, we find an actual member of the Democratic congressional leadership, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, leading off. Good for you, former Doge Of Venice beat man Bob Schieffer! But the punditry didn't really hit the fan until a congressman from (where-the-fk-else) Arizona named Matt Salmon waxed nostalgic for the last time Republican meatheads shut the government down.

I was here during the government shutdown in 1995. It was a divided government. we had a Democrat [sic] President of the United States. We had a Republican Congress. And I believe that that government shutdown actually gave us the impetus, as we went forward, to push toward some real serious compromise. I think it drove Bill Clinton in a different direction, a very bipartisan direction. In fact, we passed welfare reform for the first time ever, and we cut the welfare ranks in the last decade and a half by over 50%. These are good things. We also balanced the budget for the first time in 40 years in 1997, 1998, 1999. And when I left we had an over $230 billion surplus. This was with a Democrat [sic] president, A Republican —

(You think that's a good idea?)

Yes, I do. I really do. I think it's about time!

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The folks at Think Progress did a good job fact-checking this vandal in real time. (And, if there's one trope I'd like to see demolished further this year, it's that welfare "reform" under Bill Clinton has proven to be some kind of unalloyed triumph. Its provisions have made the lives of poor people harder during the ongoing recession, and the fact that this administration had to issue so many waivers in so many places so that so many people wouldn't suffer needlessly left it open to the famously bullshit charge that the president was "gutting" this toweringly bipartisan masterpiece.) But it shouldn't be too much to expect Salmon to notice that it is no longer 1995, and that there's no tech boom or housing bubble on the immediate horizon, and that shutting down the government in the middle of a perilously weak recovery is like trying to increase the acceleration of your car by firing a flare into your gas tank.

Finally, then, we come to Disco Dave's Disco Dance Party, which, yesterday, may have struck the perfect balance between sucking up to people who should have been long ignored, and booking people who should have been long forgotten. As to the former, well, the Dancin' Master had the Orgasmatron set to 11 because not only Simpson, but Bowles had come along as special guest stars!

Joining me now, two of the nation's leading voices on fiscal responsibility...

A former corporate bagman and Montgomery Burns's inner child. Jesus, just get a room, you three.

Look, I think he's right about a lot of stuff. First of all, we've done all the easy stuff but all of the hard decisions lay ahead of us. We have got to reform the tax code to make it more globally competitive. We have got to reduce this entitlement spending, particularly as it relates to healthcare. We've got to slow the rate of growth of healthcare to the rate of growth of the economy or it will eat the rest of the budget alive. And we've got to make Social Security sustainably solvent. If we do these things we can go a long ways to stabilizing the debt and keeping it on a downward path as a percent of GDP. But it's got to be growth, it's got to have some revenue, but the big part going forward's got to be spending cuts.

That was the Democrat talking, by the way.

And the president ignored it and the Congress has ignored it because they won't do the big stuff. And the big stuff has to get done. This other stuff is nothing. And as Erskine says so beautifully, we're the healthiest horse in the glue factory right now. The trajectory of debt, deficit and interest right now, the trajectory of debt, deficit and interest will match any of the PIG countries, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Spain. Match it. But of course we're lots bigger and, let me tell you, everybody out there in the Congress knows exactly what we have to do. And when Erskine and I traveled around for that whole year we knew they were in Congress because I could see their button. I didn't know any of them. And they said, "Save us from ourselves." How's that for courage?"

That was the Republican. Whenever these guys get together, when one of them talks, the other one should drink a glass of water.

(Also, all of the countries Simpson named enacted the kind of austerity programs that give him his bi-annual woody. It hasn't worked out well for anyone, except the central banks, of course.)

You're going to have to reduce healthcare spending on Medicare by about $500 to $600 billion over the next 10 years. You're going to have to do it in some of the ways that Mitch McConnell talked about. You're going to have to look at some kind of cost sharing. Some kind of means testing. You're going to have to look at age. You're going to have to look at lowering the price we pay the drug companies for the drugs. You're going to have to look at paying for quality instead of quantity. You're going to have to have some kind of tort reform. And we've got to do something about this whole end of life scenario without talking about death panels. We think these kinds of things we could bring down the cost of healthcare.

Again, that was the Democrat. The whole "tort reform" thing may have fooled you. And, I guarantee you, Bowles threw that in there because he needs to have it in order to get the Republicans to pretend they don't want to destroy Social Security in the next 20 minutes. It won't work, as his partner illustrated.

Look, that's going to happen. It is happening. But if the American people can't understand. I love it. They say, "Well, the polls showed you should tax the rich." Well, great, I'm ready for that. But they also said, 75% of them have said, "Cut spending." Now if anybody can't get that, and if you can't cut — forget the word cut. You stabilize. You do something with healthcare. You stabilize Social Security. For god's sake, there were 16 people paying into that and one taking out when I was a freshman at the University of Wyoming. Now there are three people paying into that baby and one taking out and the life expectancy is 78.1 instead of 60. What the hell? Who's kidding who.

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None of those numbers mean a thing, of course. Social Security is safe through 2038, even if we all accept the fact that the whole Bowles-Simpson thing was the Beltway wank-a-thon that it was.

And the show concluded with a panel that included Definer Of Civilization's Rules and Leader (perhaps) Of The Civilizing Forces Newt Gingrich, as well as Carly (Plague Ship) Fiorina. The Dance Party seems to have a real sweet-tooth for Ms. Fiorina, who's never really succeeded at anything except cratering companies in such a fashion as to make a lucrative getaway.

I've negotiated many deals in my life and here's what they take. A win-win and a willingness to treat your opponents with respect. Not a constant win-lose and a denigration of your opponent at every opportunity. You're not going to get a good deal that way.

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Yeah, after she got fired from Hewlett Packard, Fiorina cut herself a real win-win deal. She got a $21 million severance package (win!) and she got an estimated $21 million in stock options (win-win!). Of course, while she was there, 30,000 workers lost their jobs, but I'm sure she did it with respect.

Meanwhile, Gingrich, who hasn't held elective office in decades, and who most recently was soundly rejected by a Republican party that is, itself, demented, was burnishing up the past again.

But, no, we got reelected for the first time since 1928. And we would argue we would never have gotten to a balanced budget and we would have never have gotten welfare reform without that fight. So I think if the Congressional Republicans want to say, "You're going to have a really hard time with continuing resolution," that's perfectly legitimate. And it's a exactly the right grounds. And then take the president's speech from yesterday in which he said, "Once you have spent it, you have an obligation." And that's when I say, "Terrific. We agree."

Of course you would argue that. Because to argue anything else would force you to confront the reality that Bill Clinton cleaned your clock, and that he did so because he was twice as smart, and four times the politician, that Joe Klein and all those people, in combination with your own meglaomania, convinced you that you are. It is a big part of the reason why you're not speaker of the House any more. Neither Fiorina nor Gingrich has anything to say that the country particularly needs or wants to hear. If the Dancin' Master wants to know why Chris Hayes runs a serious panel discussion while he runs a clown show, he need only look at the call sheets side by side.